grinding bones to make bread

Part of my teaching in the run up to Spring is Jack and the Beanstalk. We do lots of fun phonological awareness stuff, grow some beans, study the springtime lifecycles of plants and animals, talk about the rights and wrongs of taking something that isn't yours, and -most importantly- stomp around like perpetually angry giants bellowing FEE FI FO FUM ! Oh, and we make bread from bone-flour.

I teach and support children whose first language is something other than English. Today, we had a wee follow up exercise where the bilingual children tried to write out the sounds the Giant made as he bayed for the blood of an Englishman. It's a good simple way to test phonological awareness and writing ability in the children.

So. What you see in the Giant's speech bubble is a Mandarin speaking child writing "Fee (Five) (Four) Fum". Five and four means he hears the syllable sound quite well. But.. BUT! He's written five and four using their Chinese characters (ie. not 5 and 4). This seems clever code mixing but really isn't, because in Chinese these characters aren't 'five' and 'four' they are 'wǔ' and 'sì'. Which makes the Giant bellow " Fee WOE SI FUM " which absolutely isn't what has put the frighteners on Jack !
If he has really put FEE FIVE FOUR FUM then it is good, but it goes against all our profession's assurances that supporting a child's Mother tongue has no interference with their English language acquisition. All evidence shows that the stronger a child is in their Mother tongue the more solid their learning of a new language will be...
Yet what was this child thinking as he wrote in Chinese and pronounced it in English? I have never seen anything like this kind of transference before. Especially in such diverse written forms as English and Chinese. Was it just an aberration?
Answers on a postcard...